Albert Destrade's only 'Survivor' regret is he didn't win

December 19, 2011|tvplus blog

Albert Destrade has only one regret about the way he played “Survivor: South Pacific.” He wishes he would have won.

Everyone who has ever played the game without winning wishes they had won the $1 million prize.The difference with the Plantation High baseball coach is that he feels he played well enough to win. “I know I played a stellar game, good enough to win. Sophie won the million dollars but if you look at how she played the game and how I played the game, it wasn’t that different,” Albert said by phone from Los Angeles, site of Sunday’s “Survivor” season finale.

Benjamin “Coach” Wade was presented as being the master strategist but Albert said many of the ideas Coach was given credit for originating came from him. “I would put a seed in his ear.” Most significantly, Albert said, he was the one who crafted the alliance that carried five people all the way to the end. “I did that the first day we were on the island.”

The agony of his experience was replaying in his head every day since the game ended last summer what he might have done or said differently at the final tribal council to sway the nine-person jury. As it turned out, he didn’t get a single vote.

Albert was unaware of how the vote turned out until Sunday’s finale. He was hoping for the best but the outcome wasn’t unexpected. “I know that most of the jurors had their minds made up. It sucks when you play as well as I did and you are facing a bunch of people who are bitter and emotional.”

Albert makes no apologies for anything he did, including what might have been his Waterloo, accepting, then refusing to return an immunity necklace from well meaning Brandon Hantz, who was then voted off the island. “Unfortunately, that resonated negatively with people.”

He really had no choice. “I had no other move. There’s no chance if I had given it back that I’m not getting voted out. If I had given it back, I would have been ridiculed for making one of the dumbest moves ever.”

Even after the others turned against him and seemed likely to vote him out at first opportunity, Albert managed to maneuver and cajole his way to the final three. “There was a heck of a lot of damage control I had to do. I social engineered my way to the final.”

It wasn’t all for naught. He didn’t get the big money but there is “a moderately substantial” prize for finishing third.

But it wasn’t why he went to Samoa. “This was a million dollar business trip.”